Characters with accents or other adornments can be encoded in several different ways in Unicode. For example, take the character A-acute. In Unicode, this can be encoded as a single character (the "composed" form):

00C1 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A WITH ACUTE

or as two separate characters (the "decomposed" form):

0041 LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A
0301 COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT

To a user of your program, however, both of these sequences should be treated as the same "user-level" character "A with acute accent". When you are searching or comparing text, you must ensure that these two sequences are treated equivalently. In addition, you must handle characters with more than one accent. Sometimes the order of a character's combining accents is significant, while in other cases accent sequences in different orders are really equivalent.

The ffi ligature is not a distinct semantic character, and strictly speaking it shouldn't be in Unicode at all, but it was included for compatibility with existing character sets that already provided it. The Unicode standard identifies such characters by giving them "compatibility" decompositions into the corresponding semantic characters. When sorting and searching, you will often want to use these mappings.

unorm_normalize helps solve these problems by transforming text into the canonical composed and decomposed forms as shown in the first example above. In addition, you can have it perform compatibility decompositions so that you can treat compatibility characters the same as their equivalents. Finally, unorm_normalize rearranges accents into the proper canonical order, so that you do not have to worry about accent rearrangement on your own.

Form FCD, "Fast C or D", is also designed for collation. It allows to work on strings that are not necessarily normalized with an algorithm (like in collation) that works under "canonical closure", i.e., it treats precomposed characters and their decomposed equivalents the same.

It is not a normalization form because it does not provide for uniqueness of representation. Multiple strings may be canonically equivalent (their NFDs are identical) and may all conform to FCD without being identical themselves.

The form is defined such that the "raw decomposition", the recursive canonical decomposition of each character, results in a string that is canonically ordered. This means that precomposed characters are allowed for as long as their decompositions do not need canonical reordering.

Its advantage for a process like collation is that all NFD and most NFC texts - and many unnormalized texts - already conform to FCD and do not need to be normalized (NFD) for such a process. The FCD quick check will return UNORM_YES for most strings in practice.

ICU collation performs either NFD or FCD normalization automatically if normalization is turned on for the collator object. Beyond collation and string search, normalized strings may be useful for string equivalence comparisons, transliteration/transcription, unique representations, etc.

The W3C generally recommends to exchange texts in NFC. Note also that most legacy character encodings use only precomposed forms and often do not encode any combining marks by themselves. For conversion to such character encodings the Unicode text needs to be normalized to NFC. For more usage examples, see the Unicode Standard Annex.